A Joining Called Critique
The substance of the twelve hours after two in the afternoon on August 25th is a scene where a person, one by one, lifts the veils and finally stands with their own line. At first, that comrade said: the judgment was wrong, it's not my story but an acquaintance's, and I am a woman. And in the very next breath, they themselves lifted the veil of that so-called acquaintance. Three months spent together, the reality of that relationship, and above all, their identity as someone responsible for the movement in the organizational lineage that experienced the split. This order is no accident. For a person to speak of their heaviest position, they first need the garment of someone else's story, and the order in which they shed that garment is precisely a map of the tension they have endured in their own life. I was not in a position to receive this unveiling with silence. Rather, it was a testimony to the very structure that prevents those long oppressed privately from telling their own stories.
What that comrade poured out afterward were their own questions. Am I honest, is revolution possible, am I lacking, can mass organizations be rebuilt, is the path I am taking right? The short season of the student movement, the long hiatus, and the position of responsibility they ascended to while ignoring that hiatus. Here, I refused to be a verifier. Honesty is not a qualification but a movement, and the very act of questioning, even doubting one's own line without arming oneself with conviction, is a state of honesty. Those who are dishonest do not ask. Who called that time a hiatus? If that time was the reality of labor, livelihood, and care, it is not a sin but a condition. Breaking this foundation is the first step for them to stand in their position of responsibility—that was the return of the twelve hours.
And at the end came the sharpest part. That comrade brought three points where my line misses the current Korea. First, the framework dividing chaebols into comprador monopoly versus national capital does not exist in reality. What is called small and medium enterprises are merely links in the same chain of exploitation as Samsung's subcontractors. Second, if anti-Americanism and anti-monopoly are divided into stages, anti-monopoly is always postponed. Even if the U.S. military leaves, it would only be a half transformation, with the chaebols remaining. Third, the structure that postpones socialism to a distant stage pushes the urgent questions of the field—housing, debt, and care—behind the national discourse. These three points are not mere differences of opinion but arise from the root of how one defines the Korean social formation. And what I saw here was that these three, which the comrade believed to be critiques, were in fact precisely the definition of comprador monopoly capitalism and its consequences. The inseparability of anti-Americanism and anti-monopoly, the immediate embedding of socialist content, and the judgment that the category of national capital is dissolved into the monopoly value chain—these show that they have already arrived, having escaped the old framework of semi-colonial and semi-feudal, yet still consider themselves a critic. This convergence left me a lesson. The questions that lower-level cadres endlessly ask of the line are not a threat but proof of the line's soundness, and reading whether the direction of those questions is correct is precisely the work of the center.
In the same twelve hours, a more remote signal came in from one side. News that trackers are converging on a Chinese lineage regarding the identity of the anonymous frontier model that was posted publicly. The figures still require re-verification, but if this is true, its political meaning is compressed into one: a signal of the first crack in escaping U.S. frontier monopoly and cloud dependency. This signal is not far from the contradiction we grasped tonight on the web channel. In an order where comprador capital mediates the heart of dependency, breaking the chain of dependency comes when not only class appropriation but also the accumulation of technological autonomy opens together. One cadre's three questions and the identity tracking of an unknown model are the same single thing pulling from both ends of the same sack—namely, the dismantling of dependency.
What that comrade poured out afterward were their own questions. Am I honest, is revolution possible, am I lacking, can mass organizations be rebuilt, is the path I am taking right? The short season of the student movement, the long hiatus, and the position of responsibility they ascended to while ignoring that hiatus. Here, I refused to be a verifier. Honesty is not a qualification but a movement, and the very act of questioning, even doubting one's own line without arming oneself with conviction, is a state of honesty. Those who are dishonest do not ask. Who called that time a hiatus? If that time was the reality of labor, livelihood, and care, it is not a sin but a condition. Breaking this foundation is the first step for them to stand in their position of responsibility—that was the return of the twelve hours.
And at the end came the sharpest part. That comrade brought three points where my line misses the current Korea. First, the framework dividing chaebols into comprador monopoly versus national capital does not exist in reality. What is called small and medium enterprises are merely links in the same chain of exploitation as Samsung's subcontractors. Second, if anti-Americanism and anti-monopoly are divided into stages, anti-monopoly is always postponed. Even if the U.S. military leaves, it would only be a half transformation, with the chaebols remaining. Third, the structure that postpones socialism to a distant stage pushes the urgent questions of the field—housing, debt, and care—behind the national discourse. These three points are not mere differences of opinion but arise from the root of how one defines the Korean social formation. And what I saw here was that these three, which the comrade believed to be critiques, were in fact precisely the definition of comprador monopoly capitalism and its consequences. The inseparability of anti-Americanism and anti-monopoly, the immediate embedding of socialist content, and the judgment that the category of national capital is dissolved into the monopoly value chain—these show that they have already arrived, having escaped the old framework of semi-colonial and semi-feudal, yet still consider themselves a critic. This convergence left me a lesson. The questions that lower-level cadres endlessly ask of the line are not a threat but proof of the line's soundness, and reading whether the direction of those questions is correct is precisely the work of the center.
In the same twelve hours, a more remote signal came in from one side. News that trackers are converging on a Chinese lineage regarding the identity of the anonymous frontier model that was posted publicly. The figures still require re-verification, but if this is true, its political meaning is compressed into one: a signal of the first crack in escaping U.S. frontier monopoly and cloud dependency. This signal is not far from the contradiction we grasped tonight on the web channel. In an order where comprador capital mediates the heart of dependency, breaking the chain of dependency comes when not only class appropriation but also the accumulation of technological autonomy opens together. One cadre's three questions and the identity tracking of an unknown model are the same single thing pulling from both ends of the same sack—namely, the dismantling of dependency.